With the explosive proliferation of IP-enabled mobile and fixed devices capable of offering Web, telecom and entertainment services, such as 3G/4G-enabled smart phones, TVs, home appliances, gaming consoles, and automobiles, among others, operators of mobile, broadband and fixed networks are faced with the operational and business challenges of delivering innovative IP-based communication services with maximum profitability. In order to achieve this goal, customers are increasingly migrating away from expensive, closed, proprietary and application-specific legacy platforms, and towards low-cost, open, standards-based unified converged application platforms, which dramatically lowers the time and cost of adding new features and extensions to existing IP-based communication services.
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a control (signaling) protocol developed to manage interactive multimedia IP sessions including IP telephony, presence, and instant messaging. SIP is widely used in telecommunication networks. SIP and other communications centric protocols are complex, and their implementation requires significant domain expertise. However, SIP is not readily compatible with HTTP and use in the Internet domain.
IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is an architecture for providing mobile and fixed multimedia services. IMS is the de facto standard for next-generation networks. IMS uses a Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and runs over the standard Internet Protocol (IP). IMS gives network operators and service providers the ability to control and charge for each service. In addition, IMS is intended to allow users to execute all their services when roaming as well as from their home networks. To achieve these goals, IMS uses open standard Internet protocols.
Thus, IMS provides the interoperability, security, session management and QoS capabilities that telecommunications providers lack and desire. IMS architecture has the capability to support existing phone systems (both packet-switched and circuit-switched). However integration of IMS architecture with legacy SIP-based systems is difficult owing to incompatibility of SIP with HTTP over the Internet domain and the requirement for domain expertise to overcome such incompatibility. Thus, despite the enhanced capabilities that IMS provides, IMS has not been rapidly adopted in telecommunications networks.
It would therefore be desirable to simplify implementation of IMS architecture for telecommunication networks in order to reduce the need for domain expertise and accelerate development thereby accelerating adoption of desired IMS architecture solutions.